


Die Schatten Werden Länger

by emjam



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Angst, Death has Arms? I dunno guys, Elisabeth-inspired, Family Feels, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempt, Memory Loss, Near Drowning, Nothing is Actually Resolved, Self-Esteem Issues, Some Cursing, Stan-Centric, Stangst, Suicidal Thoughts, Young Stan Twins, not always a clear distinction between stan's thoughts and the influence of Death, the style and pacing of the different parts is super inconsistent and I apologize, thoughts about self harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-15
Updated: 2017-05-15
Packaged: 2018-10-31 23:05:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10909308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emjam/pseuds/emjam
Summary: Elisabeth-inspired AU in which Stan encounters Death through a near-drowning at age 10 and experiences being Death's lifelong target. Told in 10 chronological bits and pieces from the initial interaction to 2012.





	Die Schatten Werden Länger

**Author's Note:**

> so, for those who don't know, elisabeth is a german musical about the empress of austria and her relationship/infatuation with (a personification of) death throughout her life. She is drawn to him and he repeatedly reminds her that she is his and sometimes tries to get her to join him and basically die. It's super good, and that's where I got the idea for this, though Death in this is in no way related to the personification of death in the musical.
> 
> In this, stan experiences something kinda similar to her, at first, but in this au death is not a personification (at least, not depicted in a human body), stan does not fall in love with death or anything like that, and the story diverges significantly from Elisabeth outside of the very general premise; for these reasons, I've decided to call it an au heavily inspired by elisabeth and not directly call it a crossover/tag it as such.
> 
> warnings for suicidal thoughts and a vague possibly-suicide attempt. this mentions this stuff a lot as a focus, and also mentions self-harm a few times (but it doesn't actually happen), so please stay safe and stay away if these topics will affect you!

**I.** The soft breeze brought with it the smell of the sea and tugged at Stanford and Stanley’s clothes as they chased each other. Their feet pushed small piles of sand together and scuffed others high into the air.

Stan propelled himself forward, jumping towards his brother instead of running, and successfully landing on Ford’s back with a heavy _thump._ They both tumbled loudly into the sand. “Gotcha!”

“Hey, no fair! That wasn’t running, you jumped!” Ford yelped as Stan sat on him.

“Nope, I gotcha fair and square! You didn’t say anything about jumping off _sand_ , just off of stuff like big rocks and junk.” Stan said with finality. He was technically right that it didn’t go against the rules of this particular game, a mixture of tag and hide-and-seek. One of them would hide, and once he was found, he had to run until the one designated “it” would tag him, and a new round would start. They had started implementing rules once Stan had tried to find and tag Ford all at once by jumping on him from a particularly high rock, resulting in bruises for all.

Stan would have continued to gloat if Ford didn’t eventually shove him off with a grunt. He stood, brushing sand off of his shirt and shorts. Next to him, Stan fell to the ground as the roles were reversed; Ford had gained the right to brag, and Stan was lying in the grainy sand. “Ow!”

He stood too, absolutely covered in sand as well, from the right side of his head to his right toes. His hair was full of it. Grinning at this opportunity, he shook his head like a dog and got sand all over his still-recovering brother.

Ford groaned, pausing in his attempts to shake the sand from the folds of his clothes. “Don’t get even more on me!”

“Relax, poindexter. We can just take a dip in the water and wash it all off!” He jabbed a thumb towards the waves.

“Wouldn’t our wet skin just make it easier for sand to stick to us once we were back on shore? And we don’t even have our swim trunks with us.”

“Shh.” Stan was already making his way to the water’s edge regardless.

“You just want to go swimming, don’t you?” Ford laughed, but followed anyways.

They spent some time playing in the waves, splashing at each other and diving under, but never going so far that they could be swept away; while they had plenty of experience swimming, it wasn’t enough to constitute going very far out into the water.

That is, of course, until Stan believed that it was.

Ford decided to take a break from the water and waded to shore. He was in the middle of forming a pretty alright-looking sand castle, considering he was using his bare hands and not a bucket, when suddenly Stan called out to him. He lifted his head and to his horror, Stan was farther out than either of them had ever been before. Their feet wouldn’t reach the bottom by any means there, and Stan would have to rely solely on himself to stay above the water.

“Hey Ford, check it out! I’m a stiff!” He yelled jovially, and did the Deadman’s Float, which did absolutely nothing to quell Ford’s worries.

“Stanley, get back here!” Ford yelled back. “That’s freaking me out! It’s not safe!”

Stan maneuvered his body right-side up again. “Pshaw, I can handle it! But I’ll swim back right now if it’ll get you to stop being such a baby about it,” he boasted, and began paddling back, when the churning water swiftly and forcefully dragged him back out to sea. Stan yelled and stopped floating effectively in his panic to escape, swallowing water and struggling to keep his head up.

Ford shrieked, and shouted to him something about some type of current, but anything else was rendered inaudible as water filled Stan’s ears, and he sank.

The water engulfed him, and although he didn’t feel pulled by that current anymore, he couldn’t find his way back to the surface. His arms and legs struggled to move upwards without success. It didn’t seem scary though, even though he knew he should be breaking the surface for air, and his lungs began to burn. Despite this, he stopped struggling and merely looked up at the shimmering water, its pattern rippling across the surface, the sun making it glow in almost an ethereal way. It was… almost peaceful, like coming home after a long day.

He did not see but instead felt _something_ reaching towards him, but for some reason, he didn't feel scared. It felt different from the threatening hands of bullies, and was more similar to his ma's hugs after they would come home from school. It reassured him. Its arms would take him away, but not to a bad place.

He stopped struggling, and shut his eyes.

All of a sudden, he felt an adult’s hands roughly grab him, lifting him out of the water, taking him to shore. He choked and sputtered, and Ford wrapped a concerned arm around him, blabbering about how he was worried sick and had called for help.

Stan had taken one last look at the shifting depths, its dark security lying underneath. The being’s hands reached out to him still, in its shadows. He thought of his brother, and his ma, and his favorite foods, and the pawn shop, and walked away from the outreaching limbs.

They headed home, dripping water.

 **II.** Stan threw his latest homework assignment down with a frustrated groan. He had tried to do it himself, but he just could not understand, and resigned himself to once again asking Ford if he could borrow his homework. Something about that filled him with shame and guilt, but he tried not to listen to it. _It’ll all be fine, you’ll see!_ He thought to himself unconvincingly, and looked back at the wrinkled paper on the desk.

He was 13, he should be able to understand the nuances of his own language, but for some reason English was just not getting through to him. Sentence fragments, prepositional phrases, subjects and objects, they all made no sense. Why did they have to identify parts of sentences? Why wasn’t being able to understand the language enough? Surely no one needed to actually know this stuff to read a darn book.

The book that they were told to read for English gathered dust on the floor half-hidden under the dresser, and he willed himself to push away the guilt about that too, but the empty assignment in front of him continued to dig under his skin. He knew he was stupid; the classes had gotten hard for him around 6th grade, and by 8th, trying to truly understand something had the same effect as running into a brick wall. Meanwhile, Ford continued to sail higher, earning straight As. Stanley only excelled in P.E., but he was starting to get the impression that smarts were what really mattered, and he didn’t have them. He couldn’t focus long enough and forgot the instructions seconds after they were given. He wanted to be able to succeed, but he just… couldn’t. If this kept up, high school didn’t look like it would exactly be smooth sailing.

“Ha, why would good grades even matter? You don't need an A in English to sail around the world!” He laughed to himself; it fell flat.

The thought had usually comforted him, but it didn’t work this time. He sighed.

_Ford won’t like it if I copy off of his homework forever. If I can’t even understand anything now, how will I survive the next four years? Sure, maybe Ford would be okay with tutoring me in basically everything, or letting me cheat off him. But what does that say about me? Not much._

Stanley groaned, shut his eyes, and leaned back in the chair with an audible creak. He wished for the future to just go away, instead of welling up in stunning clarity all of a sudden. He always knew it was there, but they always had a plan to sail away together, right? Their futures were definite. He had a plan already. So why was he so scared? And why did he still feel angry at himself about this damn paper?

He just wanted a safe place where thoughts couldn’t reach him, where he could relax without any worries prodding at him.

His mind, oddly enough, drifted to the oasis beneath the waves, that place years ago where he inexplicably felt something ready to relieve him; he hadn’t dwelt on the incident or thought much about it at all after the fact, but some part of him must have recalled that feeling he had gotten that day. The thing had willingly reached out to him. Now he knew what it must have been — Death — but three years ago, he knew only that something more significant, more vast, than anything he had ever seen before had promised him safety. He once again felt the pull of it, whispering to him of the same things it had proposed when he was ten.

Something clicked in his mind, and he snapped out of the odd reverie, like it were a trance.

 _No, I can’t do that. It’s not that big a deal. What am I thinking? I’ll make it. I’ll get Ford to tutor me, and if that doesn’t work I’ll cheat enough to graduate, and then we’re out of here._ He shoved his doubts and worries down until they stopped nagging him. The thoughts that had begun turning down darker roads repelled him as if they burned, and yet, he examined the idea like one scared by a ferocious beast and still drawn to it. Fascinated by it.

He locked it away in his mind, but continued to observe.

 **III.** Both of them were in their sophomore year of high school now, and Stan had been right: it never got easier. It wasn't like he didn't try in the beginning, but eventually his efforts, yielding almost no positive results, faded away to be replaced by spit-balling other kids and getting answers from other papers — mostly Ford’s — out of his peripheral vision.

He grinned a cheshire cat’s grin, laughed boisterously, and worshipped the thought that it would all be over soon, even as he claimed that cheating and spending detentions in dead silence was the life. Sometimes he wondered if being dead really was that silent. Sometimes he felt it in his sleep, a solid form coalescing from the shadows and telling him without words, _w_ _hen you need me, I will be here._ Sometimes, when he couldn't even go to Ford with his problems (if he talked about them that would make them real), he instead found comfort in a way out.

Mostly, though, he covered anything real with a joke and shot crumpled up homework into the trash bins.

  
**IV.** The walk home was lonely even though Ford was right there. Stan had attempted to engage him in conversation, at first bringing up the ideas he had for the Stan O’ War, and then, when that didn’t work, regaling him with what he thought was a riveting account of the fight Ford hadn’t gotten to see at school that day. Each entryway into conversation was shut with nothing but a short, uninterested “mm” from his brother. Sure, he made responsive noises at the right parts, but Stan could tell that he was disengaged. He knew that nothing was going on in their lives right now. Subsequently, he knew that Ford just found it boring.

This was only one of a few increasingly common “conversations” that they started to have on the way home. Stan talks, Ford listens, but not really, and Stan mostly carries the conversation by himself.

It was nearly the end of their junior year, and Stan was excited about the upcoming summer, which meant to him more time for the Stan O’ War and television and swimming, while all Ford seemed to talk about was how much reading he’d be able to get done, or how this gave him time to experiment with a project idea for the science fair next year that would, if successful, “blow the judges away, hopefully not literally, or else something would have to have gone seriously wrong.” These were all normal nerdy things that Ford always talked about, but the way he discussed them now, it seemed that he was closing off his summer schedule from Stan. He made no mention of working on the ship or even just hanging out with him. His plans only had room for one.

And just like that, Stan began to feel himself being subtly excluded from his brother’s life.

When they reached their front door, Ford started to walk in, but Stan held back. “I’m just going to go walk around, I’ll be back soon. Tell ma where I am, okay?”

“Sure.” Ford didn’t even ask him where he was going or anything. Stan knew that he shouldn’t take that as a sign, but he let it affect him anyways.

Stan’s sneakers left imprints in the sand that followed him to his resting point at the old swings. He sat down and listened to the gulls crying and the waves coming in. Chatter drifted over from the boardwalk as more students walked home.

He felt like he was slowly losing grip, like his and Ford’s original plans were beginning to slip between his fingers like sand, like he watching the start of the end, and that there would be nothing left for him after that. Despite attempting to assure himself that he was just overreacting, that nothing of the sort would happen, it seemed again that reassurances wouldn’t work. Even though Ford hadn’t yet strictly shut down their childhood dream, Stan felt it drifting away.

He looked over to the sea. There was a storm brewing not too far off, but still far enough that he didn’t need to go inside yet. White clouds drifted by but began to move on and leave room for the storm. The water seemed calm, but it was impossible to tell if the same was true beneath the surface. He stared at the blue waves, and was reminded, eventually, of sputtering, of struggling to keep his head above the water, of his near-drift into oblivion. The waves washed at the shore and drifted away, and in turn, he felt Death softly tugging at him, ebbing, and returning once more. He could almost see its phantom arms in his mind’s eye, many of them, darker than night, slowly reaching towards him. They seemed closer now than they had been before.

He looked in the direction of the arms for a moment, stood up, and went home.

Even after that day, even after he saw Ford drifting, Stan clutched to the Stan o’ War like he was a drowning man at sea and the boat was the thin line between floating and sinking.

 _Sinking wouldn’t be so bad_ , a small part of him would say at times, more and more often as graduation grew closer. _Sinking would be easy._

He carried on as usual, even with his dismal grades, even with these small voices whispering things like _what if I got caught in a current again and wasn’t saved in time? what if my hand slipped while I was cooking and I cut my arm open?_

They seemed okay. They seemed like things he could deal with. Things he could ignore. He kept telling himself how little time was left before Ford and him were gone from this place. Even when senior year came, and he spent much of his time lying on his bed staring at the far wall, and he eventually heard what the principal really thought of him. The temptation was harder to pull away from when Ford’s silence revealed how he truly felt as well, but he could manage it. Only a couple more weeks, and they could be out of this stifling town.

Right?

 **V.** At 17, standing in front of what he thought was his home, clutching a bag that contained only his clothes and a few pictures, the mixture of emotions Stan felt was impossible to discern, and no one feeling stood out from the rest as primary. He felt tears prick his eyes even as he yelled, got into his car, and left.

He knew he was an idiot, but this took the cake. He had felt like giving up a few times in the past school year, at rare moments when he let the reality of his situation get to him; he was too stupid to make anything of himself, he was drowning in the shadow of a better son, he was unable or unwilling to change anything, he could probably change something if he actually tried, he refused to try and that was the only reason that the Stan O’ War was his only plan in life. These moments, nothing completely compelling enough to actually lead to giving in, paled in comparison to the gravity of Death now.

Stan felt the tears dry on his cheeks as he drove aimlessly. Even though he didn’t have a direction in mind, the ocean pulled at him anyways, and he ended up parked at the beach, though further away from the stretch of sand near his house, or more accurately, the pawn shop. Home wasn't home anymore.

He smacked the wheel with both his palms. “Damn it!” He sniffed quietly and looked out at the ocean through the windshield and felt like throwing up.

The water was silent and dark, clouds filling the sky above and stopping most moonlight from reaching it. It was hard to see much, but Stan left his car all the same, sand shifting beneath his sneakers. He stepped slowly and surely towards the line where water meets sand. Clumps of wet sand stuck to his shoes, and then he felt the chilly saltwater flowing in from the hole in the toe of his left shoe, and realized that he was starting to walk deeper in. It was like one of those dark limbs he had become so familiar with over the years had been dragging his feet forward, inch by watery inch. He could almost see it… he knelt down and dipped his hands in. “Ugh.” It was shockingly cold.

The water licked at his pant legs as he started wading now, almost in a trance. It was a familiar feeling, but not a completely comfortable one. The cold night air chilled his tear tracks and the wet palms of his hands. Stan shivered.

His head pounded, he was cold, he was broke, and he was alone. His teeth chattered. He didn’t know what he was doing. It looked like things had been going downhill for a while now, and he wasn’t sure if he had the strength to climb uphill after this.

His thoughts fought bitterly, many breaking the surface only to be dragged away again — how could a benevolent God let a family reject their son over money — they have another son to be proud of — perhaps it wasn’t much of a loss, since they seemed to consider Stan the backup — how will he eat? Where will he go?

He looked up, but the clouds covered the stars and the moon. There was nothing but darkness around him, and water below him, settling coldly on his chest and pasting his t-shirt to his form in a way that would have gotten him scolded as a child. A distant memory of his mother asked him why he hadn’t taken off his shirt before going into the water. He closed his eyes, and tried his best to float like he used to.

Some couple that had decided to sneak down to the water in the middle of the night fished him out at some point. He assured them, even as he hacked up water from his lungs, that he was okay and didn’t need any help, that he had just “swam out too far” and they were unconvinced, which wasn’t surprising considering that he was still fully-clothed, no swim trunks in sight. It didn’t help that he was not in any way trying to return to the surface when they bumped into him. To his relief, they didn’t decide to take him anywhere. Instead, they had let him go with meaningless phrases like “take care of yourself” and “don’t do that again.” He promised them with a conman’s sincerity, and walked off without returning the blanket from their trunk that they had thrown around his shivering shoulders, because when would he happen upon a free blanket again? He was homeless and penniless now.

He was homeless now.

Stan drove further inland and settled down in his car in a remote parking lot to sleep. The blanket was still a little too wet for comfort, but everything else was even worse, so he stripped as many wet garments as he could, crawled to the back seats, and encased himself in the damp blanket. Overhead, rain began to pound on the roof.

 **VI.**  The sharp pounding on the door knocked Stan out of his middle-distance stare and urged his hands to reflexively reach for the baseball bat next to the bed. After a tangled line of exponentially horrible decisions, every knock had become sinister. Only criminals wished to visit him now. Stan hadn't had a friend for a long, long time that would want to come and visit for semi-amiable reasons, even to cash in a favor.

His mind began to flit through the people that currently held or had the opportunity to form a grudge against him, but that was something he figured out would take way too long, so he narrowed it down to those relatively in the area. _Rico._

Rico was not someone he wanted to reconnect with. When someone wronged him, he enjoyed getting someone to kidnap and torture the poor sap for as long as possible. Stan had stood by as people who dealt with Rico just disappeared without a trace, and had a pretty good guess at what happened to them. He didn't want such a drawn out ordeal of pain and suffering for himself.

He wouldn't mind just plain getting his head bashed in, though.

Even as he yelled out some empty reassurance of returning the debt, he felt himself become remotely apathetic. His arms were locked and his hands tense around the bat. If someone came to kill him, big whoop. If not…

He didn't finish that thought.

Instead of the uncomfortable sound of wood splintering, or the door unlocking, or heavy footsteps weighing down the stained carpet, all he heard was a soft _tink_ as the mail slot opened and shut.

He opened his eyes and half-expected some taped up package or a death threat or something. Looking down revealed, instead, a small innocent-looking postcard, resting plainly on the putrid carpet, its glossy surface reflecting the harsh sunlight that threw deep shadows in the room.

Huh.

Kneeling down inquisitively and pushing down the thought _I wish it had been a goon instead_ , not sure whether it came from him or not, he picked the thing up tentatively, like it was about to burst into flames at any moment.

“ _Please come - Ford”_

Stan almost stopped breathing. The decrepit room seemed a little brighter. The continuous, passive whisper in the back of his head that encouraged him to welcome goons into his place and walk straight into the ocean became quieter than it had been in years.

Finally, he had something real to look forward to.

 **VII.** Stan clutched the journal and slumped down onto the ground, curling his arms around himself in some fake attempt at comfort. The smell of burning flesh filled his nostrils, which would have made him sick to his stomach if he weren’t already. The dark basement was utterly, utterly silent, except for his harsh breathing and the occasional pained whimper that escaped from him.

The ground was warm from the electricity and para-earthly light that had previously dominated the dark room, and he had landed uncomfortably on some small rocks when he sat. The pain from the rocks slightly counteracted the much more intense pain in his shoulder.

He knew he should get up and treat the burn, even though all he had was his mediocre medical knowledge and a bathroom mirror, but he just could not will his body to move anymore. He simply gazed at the hole that had swallowed his brother up, sucked him in without a second thought. The second Ford had went through, the bright blue light dissipated, and the machine looked the same as before. Like nothing had happened. The gray wall of rock behind the portal’s eye mocked him. It urged him to go ahead and try to turn the thing on again, but he knew it wouldn’t work. He felt blank, all energy sucked out of him after his initial burst of desperation and anger, of banging on the oddly cold metal and flipping through Ford’s book.

Someplace in the back of his mind that could still form coherent thoughts wondered how the hell Ford had made any of this work, how _he_ would make any of it work. The colossal metal triangle felt larger than anything he had ever encountered in his life. His thoughts bit at him.

A pang of hunger unnumbed his mind for a moment, and he realized that he hadn’t eaten anything since that Chinese takeout a day or two ago. He also realized, dejectedly, that he would have to eat Ford’s food, the food Ford was supposed to be there to eat himself, and sleep in Ford’s house while he was trying to figure this out. It felt wrong. _As if I haven’t done enough to him._

He sat there for a while. He felt like he could sit there for hours, sleep there, whatever. He certainly did not feel like getting up would do much for him right now. Sure, there was a severe burn on his shoulder that looked a bit like something a witch would use to ward off demons, but who cared? Not him, and the only other person who ever would have was currently stuck who-knows-where, possibly dead, thanks to a certain godawful, good-for-nothing twin.

The aching silence did nothing for his guilt. It was times like these that he really wished he could just —

Suddenly, he shrieked, and jolted painfully, pulling the skin around his burn and aggravating various bruises. A sudden breeze had brushed the back of his neck, as if something had moved quickly behind him. He whipped around in an equally painful manner, and was only met with the dim gleam of metal and artificial light of machinery. Nothing was there, though the shadows weren’t helping his search much. The hell? They had definitely been down here alone… unless it was some weird experiment of poindexter’s? _God, what if it’s invisible?_

That made him tense, and he pushed himself to his feet with a newly-found death grip on the journal that almost tore at the maroon leather, facing the direction which the gust must have come from. “Hey! Who’s there!”

The shout echoed eerily in the vast chamber and made his skin itch. He walked slowly through the sliding door, trying not to remember the feeling of slamming through the doorway and falling into the room beyond, and entered the room with all the lights and controls. The orange glow of the symbol burned onto him caught his eye even though he made every attempt at avoiding it.

He peered around the dull room and was exasperated when nothing revealed itself or explained what had made that breeze. Nothing had moved, and certainly not in a way that would push around enough air that it would reach Stan. And since it was a fucking basement, he was _very_ doubtful that natural wind would reach its way down here.

Maybe it was just… really weird venting? Unable to stop himself, Stan imagined Ford’s voice explaining to him something vague about air circulation that justified a highly specific air conditioning system down here. Something sciency. That made him feel better about the bizarre wind, at least, even with the crushing weight of literally everything else. He let out a small, wet laugh at imagining Ford making fun of him for thinking there was some weirdo creature down here.

 _I am here._ There wasn’t an external voice; rather, the words appeared in Stan’s head like a thought, but it was in no way his own. They sounded like someone else. A foreign thought inside his head left him with a headache and twice as much fear as before.

“Wha-what the hell was that?” God damn it, just when he got himself calmed down, this shit had to start speaking to him, or something? He backed up into a control panel and looked around warily. “I swear, if you don’t come out from where you’re lurkin’ _right now_ , I - “

 _You know me, Stanley Pines._ The interruption, oddly enough, forced him into silence. He recognized that voice from somewhere, wispy, almost intangible. There was no way to place it, but it felt nostalgic, like an old friend.

 _I_ am _a friend. We met a long time ago, remember?_ His mind was involuntarily flooded with images of waves and the depths of the ocean, and just like that, he knew what this was.

 _I want to help you._ He could sense the arms now, the ghastly shadow of a figure in front of him.The figure of Death couldn’t be seen visually, but it was definitely there, and he felt it with uncomfortable clarity. It was like he could almost see it, if he just squinted hard enough, maybe if he put on some glasses for once —

He sensed that one arm reached out to him, and its gravity was painful to resist, but he managed, cautious, as it continued “speaking”. _There isn’t an easy fix for this, is there? The interdimensional portal takes much more than your level of education to understand. You will have to teach yourself, and it won’t be easy. It will not take weeks or months, but years._ It seemed to cock its head, even though it didn’t have one. Stan wasn’t going to try to wrap his head around that. _Do you want that?_ It felt like everything it was saying was something he could just as easily tell himself, but coming from this it felt… more solid. Death’s agreement with his concerns was like a warm blanket wrapped around his aching soul.

Stan had attempted to defy the pull, but at this, he faltered. Could he even get Ford back fast enough? What if he finally got it working again and it was too late? These questions piled among the many towering pillars in his mind that seemed ready to suffocate him. Everything he had to deal with up to this crucial moment mounted upon it and manufactured a ready breaking point.

Maybe he was fated to fail either way. Deciding to resist Death would let him try to get Ford out of wherever he was just shoved into, but if he were being honest, he couldn’t do this. It was impossible. He wasn’t smart enough. And anyways, who would care if he died now? Maybe Ford was happier wherever he was. And he had been resisting for such a long time… maybe that was the wrong thing to do.

_Are you ready?_

In lieu of a vocal response, he put one foot forward in Death’s direction and felt satisfaction emanate from it, which made him oddly satisfied as well. The unspoken invitation was enticing; he began to feel the urge to take the hand still offered to him. His fingers untensed from their stiff grip on whatever they were clenching, letting go - a fist, a book -

 _Thud_ . The noise was loud, louder than the deafening silence that had replaced their _stupid_ bickering and Ford’s _screams_ , and Stan jumped almost imperceptibly in surprise. He looked down, to the source of the clap of solid on rock floor, and saw it.

The maroon journal, the gold reflecting the multicolor lights and red overtones of the control panels and lights behind him.

Ford’s journal.

_Ford._

Stan shook his head and felt fog clear from his mind that he hadn’t known was even there. He dragged his mind away from Death’s clutches, scrambling to yank the journal — the last piece of his brother — away from its questionable place in between his feet and the murky, indescribable form of Death. “What the fuck? No! I’m not “ready” yet. What kind of question is that? I have to get Ford back! I don’t care if it takes years, or even decades, I have to make sure he gets back here safe.” He looked down at the journal in his hands. “I… I still have his glasses with me…” He belatedly realized they were still sitting on the floor in front of the portal and felt queasy leaving them alone. “And I need to apologize to him… and I can’t give up the possibility that that could happen.”

He stared defiantly at Death’s hazy presence, and felt its surprise - confusion - amusement in the space where it had spoken in his head. “Oh, don’t think that I’m joking here pal, I’m not.” He attempted to keep his voice from cracking, and thought he was doing a pretty good job, all things considered.

_I thought you wanted to leave._

“No.” Stan’s eyes gleamed with unshed tears, and what came out of his mouth next was uncertain, wavering, as if he didn’t fully believe it himself, but he said it with as much conviction as he could muster. “I want to live.” _I need to. For Ford._

He couldn’t stand being in the basement after that, and went upstairs as fast as possible, not even checking to see what happened to Death once he tore himself away from it. He slept on the first floor in Ford’s room that night, no matter how wrong that felt. He knew deep in his bones that if he had stepped forward and made contact with Death’s hand in that cold, shadowy room, he would be dead.

 **VIII.** The last tourists left for the day, and the final click of the door shutting triggered an immediate response in Stan; his padded shoulders fell from their tense posture, his stretched grin fell from its aching position. He rubbed his face with his right hand. And it was silent again.

Death was background noise as usual, but it had been years since it had tried to confront him like it had in the basement when Ford disappeared. While its mental presence was a bit more active, its physical presence had long since faded to a faint taste of rot in the air, a whispering voice, a rare inexplicable shiver that ran down his spine. These occurrences put him on edge far less than they used to; indeed, even the luring and tugging he experienced earlier in life had creeped him out more. Now it was like a steady, dull ache that made Stan hunger for relief, but not enough to seek it out. Not with his unfinished business. Stan still had no idea why Death thought he was a pretty great piece of flesh to dig its metaphysical talons into, but as long as it was ignorable, he pushed through it. He had a reason to, now, and as much as he would like to let his body go — stop thinking, stop doing — his obligation imposed a tether stronger than anything he had ever experienced, or, as it really mattered, stronger than Death’s lure, that was for sure.

Stan, in short, was more motivated to live, work, and exist in general than he had been in years, even with the thing's constant presence.

So he kept living, day to day to day, even when he felt like finally giving in and letting the thing have what it wanted. He kept fucking going, because his life had a concrete purpose again — and of course, it was just as deeply tied with his brother as before — and he was determined to reach his goal, or, ha, die trying.

Slapping his fez down on the gift shop counter, he went up to the vending machine door (another thing in this house he bastardized to keep the con going; the door was just a regular door before, the gift shop was just a room, the house was just _Ford’s house_ ), put in the code, and descended, not completely able to push away the image of tripping down the stairs and bashing his head in. The shadows seemed darker than usual today, the walls damper, but he made his way to the portal controls all the same.

Stan tried to work. He tried to read physics books, tried to figure out what some of Ford’s old notes meant, tried to do _something_ that night that would get him closer to bringing him back… but something down here was suffocating. He felt the shadows creeping in on him, that faint whispering get slightly louder…

And went right back up the stairs, up the elevator, and into the gift shop. It was easiest for it to reach him down there, but up here he was less susceptible. He must have only been down there for ten minutes or so; Death was coming on pretty strong that time… though that was probably because Stan wasn’t in the best place to begin with. It probably capitalized on Stan’s bad feelings or something. Maybe he should stay away from the basement when he already felt... exhausted like that. He swallowed down the unbidden thoughts of accidentally injuring himself beyond repair.

He leaned back on the vending machine, overcoming the uneasy queasiness and discomfort, when he saw the boy.

His small hands were holding the fez Stan had left on the counter, completely distracted by it. He didn't even seem to notice that his boss just walked out of a secret entrance from behind a vending machine, which Stan supposed was nothing short of a miracle, and thanked a god he didn't believe in for the kid’s ever-wandering attention.

“Hey, uh, kid, what're you doin’ with my hat?”

The boy almost seemed scared for a moment, frightened out of his thoughts. “Oh, hey Mr. Pines. It's Soos, by the way.” It's been months and Stan still can’t remember that. “D’ya think I could be Mr. Mystery someday, like you dude?”

To be honest, Stan had no idea how to respond to that. Somebody looked up to him? Somebody wanted to be like him someday? That was a lot of _feelings_ to process, so he decided to stop thinking about that and look back at the kid.

The kid — _Soos, his name is Soos_ — was still looking up at him with hope in his eyes. Normally Stan was all for crushing kids’ dreams, but he was feeling the exact opposite right now. He couldn’t explain it, but Soos just made him want to… protect him.

Yikes.

“Hey, Mr. Mystery is a pretty unique role there. But I dunno, if you play your cards right…” Fuck, why did he say that? “Uh, get your grubby mitts off’a that.” He reached slowly out to the fez and lightly pulled it from Soos’s grasp.

“Really?” Soos, ignoring Stan’s gruff comment, looked like his life had just been made, which scared Stan a little.

“Uh, sure. Go home, kid.”

Soos pulled on his jacket and ran out the door with an incredulous look on his face. “See ya, Mr. Pines!”

Stan didn't know why, but the darkness piling behind the vending machine and in his head became a little lighter, somehow.

 **IX.** It had been 30 years of all-nighters and losing and gaining hope when Stan agreed to watch two sticky little kids for the summer (twins, which both made him laugh and brought up stabbing memories of his own, made painful through the twisting of loss).

He had no idea, truthfully, what he was in for.  

At first he thought, _kids just need food and water, right? How hard could it be?_ This, of course, was turned upon its head the second Mabel and Dipper arrived at his beat-up stolen shack, and he immediately realized that his distant fondness for them when they were born apparently grew exponentially in their absence, and without his knowledge. It must have, because suddenly he was forcing them to go fishing with him on the sad Stan O’ War ripoff that always made him want to jump overboard and drown when he was on it, even though he bought and named the rickety thing himself. Despite the depressing boat, he felt the urge to share fishing and the lake with them, and even made them hats. And when they came back from their monster hunt to be with him, the nosy hands of Death were banished from his thoughts, and he spent an entire joyful afternoon without their manipulative presence in his head.

He learned over time that the kids weren't so sticky and little, and marveled at their cleverness and boldness. Dipper had a good head on his shoulders, and fierce determination; Mabel brightened up practically anyone's day whether they wanted it or not, which did wonders for this decades-old trodden path Stan had managed to continue teetering down. The kids made old standard aspects of his life exciting again, because he had someone to show them to and share them with. A fresh pair of eyes made even Greasy’s Diner a fun experience. He had gone to some of these places with Soos before, but there were only so many family activities one could permit themselves to attend with a man-child employee, even though Soos was still important to him. (He'd punch that kid’s dad someday, unknown location be damned.)

And even though the end of the day still resigned itself to dreary imaginings of Stan getting electrocuted by a stray portal wire or even just passing in his god damn sleep at this point, Mabel and Dipper’s shenanigans kept those thoughts at bay in the daylight, and even though they didn't know that, he was still grateful.

  
**X.** When Stan was finally about to die — or, his mind, anyway — he was pretty amused that it wasn't that lurking thing coming to take him after all these years. Just as amusing, thanks to the circumstances it was his brother, for whom he had worked day in and day out to get back without so much as a genuine thanks. A flash of deep ocean water sparked in his mind and faded just as quickly.

 _No time to be petty, though._ He straightened Ford's glasses on his face — their prescriptions were slightly different, and it was giving him a mad headache – and yanked the gloves tighter down his hands. The fabric stuffed in the gloves to fill out the extra space rubbed against his hands. In a sense, he was immensely glad for it to be over in some way or another. He supposed that he would still be living, but that he would just be a new person, without everything that made Stan _him_.

He had to admit, that was a little frightening, but after decades of conning some people and pretending to be others, it didn't feel like such a loss to him. The thought of an end, as always, and possibly quite disturbingly, was actually extremely comforting. He wasn't even using his mind for much anyways, so a completely blank slate seemed like a pretty good idea. And the loss of his memories was honestly alright; there weren’t a lot of those he would willingly keep.

Except for those of this past summer, popsicles and the smell of pine and a couple of kids that cracked open his heart - but if he thought about that, he couldn’t bring himself to do this, so he didn’t.

He distinctly felt Death protesting in the back of his head, wanting him all for itself, and decided then and there that he was absolutely going through with this. Hopefully that thing would finally leave him alone if he wasn't _him_ anymore.

* * *

His first impression of the world was soft, grassy ground, the sun filtering through tall pines, a warm clearing, and a feeling of peace.

And, even though he grasped for any recollection of who or where he was, he felt so light, and for some reason it felt like he had not been this free in a very long time, however old he was.

A crying family approached him, and his first guilt stained his conscience, even though he didn't really know what it was for. He hadn't meant to hurt whoever these people were. The girl seemed distraught when he aimed for distant politeness, and that stuck some broken, lost chord within him.

And behind all this sadness, he felt some other presence that made him shiver in the summer heat, in a coat that was the wrong size, but no matter how much he looked around, he couldn't see anyone other than this hodgepodge group of people.

He let himself be led through the woods.

**Author's Note:**

> I have been thinking about and playing with this fic for like almost a year at this point and even though it's not everything I wanted it to be, it looks done to me, and I'm happy about that. I had like four more pages written for this that continued after where this ends, but until I think I should make a sequel, I decided this was the best place to stop.
> 
> The title is from Elisabeth itself, and it translates to "Shadows are Getting Longer", apparently. Here's a link to the English translation of that song, just cause: http://lyricstranslate.com/en/die-schatten-werden-l%C3%A4nger-shadows-are-getting-longer.html
> 
> Also, idk what this format is, lol, but I didn't like the idea of it in chapters so I slapped some roman numerals on there to make it formally separated without chapters :p


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